Larry Kart

I've been meaning to ask the same thing.

Will have to finish it some day, but Pee Wee Erwin's autobiography "This Horn For Hire" seemed excellent until the point I was interrupted and began to read something else. Also, here is a piece I wrote about Arthur Rollini's excellent autobiography: [1987] Arthur Rollini’s name does not loom large in the history of jazz, even though he was the younger brother of a major artist (bass saxophonist and mallet percussionist Adrian Rollini) and a member of Benny Goodman’s saxophone section from the inception of Goodman’s band until 1939. But perhaps because of his cog-in-the-wheel status, Rollini has written a very moving autobiography , Thirty Years With the Big Bands --a book that captures the feel of the Swing Era from a sideman’s point of view with an attractive blend of stoicism and wit. Rollini’s tale also is suffused with a casual, peculiarly American grace, as though, like one of Sherwood Anderson’s narrators, the seeming innocence with which he addresses us were essential to his message. Rollini records that any early childhood memory was of “the brass and crystal Ansonia clock on our mantel, which never ceased functioning as long as it was wound every eighth day. It was always wound on time, and its little mercury pendulum kept beating back and forth and intrigued me. I would view it for hours.” Nothing more than nostalgia, one thinks, until, several pages and decade or so further on, Rollini’s father dies and “the only sound in the living room was the little clock on the mantel, which ticked away and gonged softly on the hour and half hour, its little pendulum still beating back and forth in perfect rhythm.” Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Rollini was a professional musician at age seventeen--traveling to London to work with Fred Elizade’s orchestra at the Savoy Hotel, where the Prince of Wales often sat in on drums. (“He was, let us put it this way, not too good,” Rollini says.) Jazz fans will be most interested in Rollini’s account of his time with Benny Goodman, which confirms the widely held belief that Goodman was a difficult man to get along with. “Inconsiderate Benny, the best jazz clarinetist in the world!”--Rollini uses that tag, and variations thereof, time after time, even when a harsher adjective than “inconsiderate” might apply. Rollini and Dick Clark were Goodman’s initial tenor saxophonists, and “even at this stage,” Rollini says, “Benny would look at Dick’s bald head with disdain. He wanted a youthful looking band. ‘Fickle Benny,’ I thought, ‘the best jazz clarinetist in the world!’ Dick was a good player.” Quietly authoritative, Rollini’s tales of the sideman’s happy-sad life have a cumulative power. And two of them, when placed side by side, virtually define the big-band musician’s paradoxical role. In the first, Rollini is playing a dance with Goodman when he meets an old high school friend, one Johnny Baker, who requests that the band play “Always,” on the recording of which Rollini had a solo. At the dance, Rollini deliberately plays “something entirely different from what was on our recording, and after it was over Johnny Baker said to me, ‘What did you change it for?’” Then, in the mid-1940s, when Rollini was an NBC Radio staff musician, he stops in a Manhattan bar after work and notices that “two young men were playing the jukebox and had selected Will Bradley’s ‘Request for a Rhumba,’ which we had recorded in 1941. Finally I stepped off the bar stool and asked, “Boys, why are you playing that record over and over?” One replied, “We like the tenor sax solo.” I felt elated, but did not tell them that it was I who played it.”

A crazy song, introduced a decade earlier by David Allyn with Boyd Raeburn. Dig Russ Freeman's piano here.

Debut tonight at The Empty Bottle of my son's new band, 1894.

Chris is a pal of mine, and I hope to heaven he is not 'late'! He edited some novels by Jeffery Archer, who makes a lot of money spinning stories but is a terrible writer, and will not allow anything to be changed, including nonsensical errors of chronology, like having a character 28 years old and 34 two pages later. Hey -- a lot can happen in two pages.

Poor Art Taylor. His hi-hat squeaks, and he rushes, etc. (see Allen Lowe's posts on the subject, plus Lewis Porter's detailed notes to Coltrane's "Fearless Leader" box set). On the other hand, he had a cool moustache and was part of rhythm sections that at times swung like crazy (listen, for one, to "There Will Never Be Another You" on Louis Smith's "Smithville").

A little tale of editing at a newspaper. Lots of copy editors are scared of the word "like" misused as a conjunction ("like you have done" -- should be "as you have done") and thus, without bothering to grasp the principle involved, purge all uses of "like" other than "like" as a verb (and I can even imagine one of them changing "I like" to "I prefer"). Years ago, I wrote a review that began: "Like Miles Davis, Stan Getz typically picks fine rhythm sections..." or something of the sort. The copy desk changed that to "As does Miles Davis, Stan Getz" etc.

In case anyone still cares, I found a working link to Paul W. Schroeder's brilliant essay "Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War": http://ir.emu.edu.tr/staff/ekaymak/courses...terfactuals.pdf It's of much broader interest than its title may suggest.

So I've heard.

But if he'd said, "You should talk to my wife Jacqui McLean"?

Yes, that's a pic of Carol Kaye with someone -- not the as yet unseen by us pic of Evans with the female bassist.

I see that it was no less than Sangrey who brought up Les Strand here last year, posting a Smith Blindfold Test in which he praised him.

Leon Sash's wife can be heard accompanying her husband here: http://www.amazon.com/Remember-Newport-Leo...howViewpoints=1 And going even further afield, a related Chicago figure was organist Les Strand, who made three albums for Fantasy (yes) around that time. I recall reading that Jimmy Smith admired Strand's playing, though Strand (who played the Baldwin) may have been the most un-bluesy jazz organist imaginable.

Like Jim, I want to see the photo, but if it is Evans, and the bassist is Lee Morgan, Leon Sash's wife, they all were around Chicago when Evans was in the army stationed at Ft. Sheridan up in the northern suburbs. That was when Evans ran across Chicago singer Lucy Reed, with whom he later recorded for Fantasy. In fact, Sash recorded for Fantasy too IIRC.

Imagine if somebody wrote a book about food which confused lemongrass with lemons. If I knew/cared about food at a certain level, that would leave a sour (no pun intended) taste in my mouth for the rest of the book, no matter how spot on it might otherwise have been. Guaranteeing proper use of craft-specific terminology is a simple sign of respect for that craft. I've lived in a time where the craft was respected while the art was overlooked, now sometimes I feel that it's the craft that is getting disrespected & the art glorified. Neither is a satisfactory dynamic as far as I'm concerned, becuase ultimately you can't have one without the other, not in a living, breathing world. I don't know about that $800.00 guy, but who was your real buddy? Bill Kirchner, that's who. Is that an actual career, being a reader for music books and stopping it before it gets started? If so, how much does the gig pay, and where do I go for an interview? Well, both Bill and the $800 guy were necessary, but Bill's kind of expertise and care were much rarer than what the $800 guy had to give, though he was very good of his kind. No, "being a reader for music books" is not a career, though there are fees or honorariums; the one time I did it, I got to pick $150 worth of books from the publisher's backlist -- whoopee! Usually (or so I believe), the problem from the publisher's point of view is that the people who are qualified to give an opinion are also very conscientious and therefore understandably unwilling to put a good deal of time and effort into a task that doesn't really "pay." Either that, or they do agree to do it and then push the job to the back of their "things to do" list and take a very long time to report back, thus holding up the whole project. Assuming that the reader is one of the right people, it works out best when he or she thinks that the book, if done well, would really be worth doing; then everything -- motivation, judgment, etc. -- falls into place.

On the other hand, one of the so-called "readers" who read my manuscript in order to advise the publisher whether it was worth doing at all was musician-writer Bill Kirchner, and Bill didn't let anything get past him. With such books on somewhat specialized subjects, it's probably in that stage that the author is going to get the most help.

What makes you think that the editor, if there even was one in the sense you mean (i.e. a text editor rather than an acquisitions editor; that kind of editor typically doesn't do more than glance at manuscripts), would have known the difference? In the case of my book -- a compilation of previously published pieces, with some new material -- Yale U. Press told me that they don't text edit such manuscripts in house, that if I wanted that kind of editing they would recommend some freelancers but that I'd have to pay him or her out of my own pocket! I took that route (cost was $800; my advance against royalties was $1,000) and am glad I did (he caught some errors and even said that he enjoyed reading the thing), but this text-editor knew little about jazz or music, so if I'd made a mistake in that area, he wouldn't have caught it. No doubt Kelley's situation was a bit different -- he speaks of a long gestation process and credits two editors, one of them as a "musician-editor" -- but, I'd be surprised if either one pored over the manuscript per se with pencil in hand.

It's not the version from James Moody's "Great Day" -- no trombone solo there.

The first reference I saw was on page 72, paragraph 2. However, I am only about 100 pages in. It's clear from that reference that what Kelley means by "sing solfeggio while he played" is that Monk made sounds that approximated/stood for the pitches he played as he played them. It was not, I think, a good idea to use the term that loosely because "solfeggio" has a common and more specific meaning: "The singing, especially as a musical teaching device, of scales, intervals, and melodic exercises to solmization syllables [i.e. where pitches are designated by specific syllables rather than letter names]." Perhaps a tad pretentious on Kelley's part, especially when he adds "though a more precise description might be groaning, moaning, and humming," but no big deal.

This one? Yes. As Dick Sudhalter writes of the two different takes by the Jenney band, "though his methods and the way he hears the song remain consistent, he never repeats an idea or construction in any but a general way."

Jimmy Cleveland, "If You Could See Me Now," with Gil Evans: http://www.rhapsody.com/gil-evans/gil-evan...now/lyrics.html Jimmy Cleveland, "Ballad of The Sad Young Men," with Gil Evans: http://www.rhapsody.com/gil-evans/the-comp...c-jazz-sessions

Jack Jenney's "Stardust" with his own band: not his later and more famous solo on the Artie Shaw recording, lovely though that is.

zanonesdelpueblo -- Could you cite a page number or two where Kelley uses "solfeggio" in that odd way? I have the book but am waiting to finish something else before I start. Consulted the index, but that didn't help (which may be my fault),

Exactly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfège Allen is correct, with the additional fact that these specific intervals are linked to specific syllables -- e.g. do, re, fa, sol, la -- as a learning-teaching technique.